PALO ALTO, Calif. — A Palo Alto-based data analysis company has agreed to pay more than $1.6 million to settle a U.S. Department of Labor charge that it discriminated against Asian applicants for software engineering jobs. Palantir Technologies Inc. provides software and data analysis services for government agencies and private industry. It received $340 million […]

A retired social worker filed a lawsuit against the city of Santa Clara March 30, citing that the city’s at-large election system has prevented Asian Americans from being elected to City Council despite a 38 percent Asian minority population in the city. “Something is wrong when such a sizeable Asian American population cannot elect candidates […]

FROM RACE TO ETHNICITY: INTERPRETING JAPANESE AMERICAN EXPERIENCES IN HAWAII By Jonathan Y. Okamura (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014, 272 pp., $42, cloth) It is a somewhat curious fact that many of the people I have met on the mainland, Japanese Americans and others alike, seem rather uninformed about the Nikkei experience in Hawai‘i. (I […]

The U.S. Department of Labor filed an administrative lawsuit against Palantir Technologies Inc. Sept. 26, accusing the Palo Alto-based data analysis company of discriminating against Asians who wanted to work on the company’s $340 million worth of government contracts. The complaint was filed with the department’s Office of Administrative Law Judges, which functions as a […]

Ever since I have been writing my Nichi Bei column “The Great Unknown and the Unknown Great” in 2007, I have devoted an annual column to studying the history of Japanese American sexuality, and in particular in-group attitudes toward homosexuality and the presence of gays and lesbians. I am proud to continue that tradition with […]

We live in anxious times. We probably always will. And I don’t say this lightly. I’ll never shake the memories of the times I sprinted out of my office in the Senate or rushed down the steps of the Capitol in panicked evacuation because planes had come too close and were possible terrorist attacks. Sometimes […]

WASHINGTON — U.S. President Barack Obama called Dec. 15 for a continued fight against discrimination and bigotry, citing the country’s unfair past treatment of some Europeans and Chinese, as well as the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans. Obama made the remarks at an event in Washington as popular Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump faced mounting […]

TOKYO — Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward plans to issue certificates recognizing same-sex couples as being in “relationships equivalent to marriage,” becoming the first local government in Japan to do so. The plan is set down in a draft statute incorporated in a fiscal 2015 budget unveiled Feb. 12. The draft statute is to be presented to […]

It’s a strange word, “stigma.” In preparing to write this column for the Day of Remembrance issue, this word came up on several occasions. On further research, I learned that the archaic meaning of “stigma” was “a mark made by a branding iron on the skin of a criminal or slave.” It’s a term that […]

In a recent New Yorker cartoon, a dog is shown lounging by a pool and saying to a pup: “YouTube’s one thing, but cats will never make it on the big screen.” A funny commentary, surely, but in America that statement could just as easily be applied to ethnic minorities, especially Asian Americans. Cats and […]